Albert Einstein : Accomplishments

"Out yonder was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned as a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in its pursuit. The mental grasp of this extra-personal world within the frame of our capabilities presented itself to my mind, half consciously, half unconsciously, as a supreme goal."

Einstein was familiar with the mystic experience, and he describes it with more precision and inherent awe than any accounts I have come across. His quotations mark him as a wonderfully wise man. But the man was known for his brilliance in physics, not illumination. Where's the science, you masy ask...

Commentary by Thomas Levenson:
Q: How Smart Was He?
A: (Really Smart.)

There is a parlor game physics students play:
Who was the greater genius? Galileo or Kepler?
(Galileo) Maxwell or Bohr? (Maxwell, but it's
closer than you might think). Hawking or
Heisenberg? (A no-brainer, whatever the
best-seller lists might say. It's Heisenberg). But
there are two figures who are simply off the
charts. Isaac Newton is one. The other is Albert
Einstein. If pressed, physicists give Newton
pride of place, but it is a photo finish -- and no
one else is in the race.
Newton's claim is obvious. He created modern
physics. His system described the behavior of
the entire cosmos -- and while others before him
had invented grand schemes, Newton's was
different. His theories were mathematical,
making specific predictions to be confirmed by
experiments in the real world. Little wonder that
those after Newton called him lucky -- "for
there is only one universe to discover, and he
discovered it. "

But what of Einstein? Well, Einstein felt
compelled to apologize to Newton. "Newton,
forgive me;" Einstein wrote in his
Autobiographical Notes. "You found the only
way which, in your age, was just about possible
for a man of highest thought and creative
power." Forgive him? For what? For replacing
Newton's system with his own -- and, like
Newton, for putting his mark on virtually every
branch of physics.

That's the difference. Young physicists who
play the "who's smarter" game are really asking,
"how will I measure up?" Is there a shot to
match -- if not Maxwell, then perhaps Lorentz?
But Einstein? Don't go there. Match this:

In 1905, Einstein is 26, a patent examiner,
working on physics on his own. After
hours, he creates the Special Theory of
Relativity, in which he demonstrates that
measurements of time and distance vary
systematically as anything moves relative
to anything else. Which means that
Newton was wrong. Space and time are
not absolute -- and the relativistic universe
we inhabit is not the one Newton
"discovered."

That's pretty good -- but one idea, however
spectacular, does not make a demi-god. But
now add the rest of what Einstein did in 1905:

In March, Einstein creates the quantum
theory of light, the idea that light exists as
tiny packets, or particles, that we now call
photons. Alongside Max Planck's work on
quanta of heat, and Niels Bohr's later work
on quanta of matter, Einstein's work
anchors the most shocking idea in
twentieth century physics: we live in a
quantum universe, one built out of tiny,
discrete chunks of energy and matter.

Next, in April and May, Einstein publishes
two papers. In one he invents a new
method of counting and determining the
size of the atoms or molecules in a given
space and in the other he explains the
phenomenon of Brownian motion. The net
result is a proof that atoms actually exist --
still an issue at that time -- and the end to a
millennia-old debate on the fundamental
nature of the chemical elements.

And then, in June, Einstein completes
special relativity -- which adds a twist to
the story: Einstein's March paper treated
light as particles, but special relativity sees
light as a continuous field of waves. Alice's
Red Queen can accept many impossible
things before breakfast, but it takes a
supremely confident mind to do so.
Einstein, age 26, sees light as wave and
particle, picking the attribute he needs to
confront each problem in turn. Now that's
tough.

And of course, Einstein isn't finished.
Later in 1905 comes an extension of
special relativity in which Einstein proves
that energy and matter are linked in the
most famous relationship in physics:
E=mc2. (The energy content of a body is
equal to the mass of the body times the
speed of light squared). At first, even
Einstein does not grasp the full
implications of his formula, but even then
he suggests that the heat produced by
radium could mark the conversion of tiny
amounts of the mass of the radium salts
into energy.

In sum -- an amazing outburst: Einstein's 1905
still evokes awe. Historians call it the annus
mirabilis, the miracle year. Einstein ranges from
the smallest scale to the largest (for special
relativity is embodied in all motion throughout
the universe), through fundamental problems
about the nature of energy, matter, motion, time
and space--all the while putting in forty hours a
week at the patent office.

And that alone would have been enough to
secure Einstein's reputation. But it is what
comes next that is almost more remarkable.
After 1905, Einstein achieves what no one since
has equaled: a twenty year run at the cutting
edge of physics. For all the miracles of his
miracle year, his best work is still to come:

In 1907, he confronts the problem of
gravitation -- the same problem that
Newton confronted, and solved -- almost.
Einstein begins his work with one crucial
insight: gravity and acceleration are
equivalent, two facets of the same
phenomenon. Where this "principle of
equivalence" will lead remains obscure, but
to Einstein, it offers the first hint of a
theory that could supplant Newton's.

Before anyone else, Einstein recognizes
the essential dualism in nature, the
co-existence of particles and waves at the
level of quanta. In 1911 he declares
resolving the quantum issue to be the
central problem of physics.

Even the minor works resonate. For
example, in 1910, Einstein answers a basic
question: "Why is the sky blue?" His paper
on the phenomenon called critical
opalescence solves the problem by
examining the cumulative effect of the
scattering of light by individual molecules
in the atmosphere.

Then in 1915, Einstein completes the
General Theory of Relativity--the product
of eight years of work on the problem of
gravity. In general relativity Einstein shows
that matter and energy--all the "stuff" in
the universe--actually mold the shape of
space and the flow of time. What we feel
as the "force" of gravity is simply the
sensation of following the shortest path we
can through curved, four-dimensional
space-time. It is a radical vision: space is
no longer the box the universe comes in;
instead, space and time, matter and energy
are, as Einstein proves, locked together in
the most intimate embrace.

In 1917, Einstein publishes a paper which
uses general relativity to model the
behavior of an entire universe. General
relativity has spawned some of the
weirdest, and most important results in
modern astronomy (see Alan Lightman's
article on this website), but Einstein's
paper is the starting point, the first in the
modern field of cosmology--the study of
the behavior of the universe as a whole. (It
is also the paper in which Einstein makes
what he would call his worst
blunder--inventing a "cosmological
constant" to keep his universe static. When
Einstein learned of Edwin Hubble's
observations that the universe is
expanding, he promptly jettisoned the
constant.)

Returning to the quantum, by 1919, six
years before the invention of quantum
mechanics and the uncertainty principle
Einstein recognizes that there might be a
problem with the classical notion of cause
and effect. Given the peculiar, dual nature
of quanta as both waves and particles, it
might be impossible, he warns, to
definitively tie effects to their causes.

Yet as late as 1924 and 1925, Einstein still
makes significant contributions to the
development of quantum theory. His last
work on the theory builds on ideas
developed by Satyendra Nath Bose, and
predicts a new state of matter (to add to
the list of solid, liquid, and gas) called a
Bose-Einstein condensate. The condensate
was finally created at exceptionally low
temperatures only last year.

In sum: Einstein is famous for his distaste for
modern quantum theory --largely because its
probabilistic nature forbids a complete
description of cause and effect. But still, he
recognizes many of the fundamental
implications of the idea of the quantum long
before the rest of the physics community does.

After the quantum mechanical revolution of
1925 through 1927, Einstein spends the bulk of
his remaining scientific career searching for a
deeper theory to subsume quantum mechanics
and eliminate its probabilities and uncertainties.
It is the end, as far as his contemporaries
believe, of Einstein's active participation in
science. He generates pages of equations,
geometrical descriptions of fields extending
through many dimensions that could unify all
the known forces of nature. None of the
theories work out. It is a waste of time...and yet

Contemporary theoretical physics is dominated
by what are known as "String theories." They
are multi-dimensional. (Some versions include
as many as 26 dimensions, with fifteen or
sixteen curled up in a tiny ball.) They are
geometrical -- the interactions of one
multi-dimensional shape with another produces
the effects we call forces, just as the "force" of
gravity in general relativity is what we feel as we
move through the curves of four-dimensional
space-time. And they unify, no doubt about it: in
the math, at least, all of nature from quantum
mechanics to gravity emerges from the
equations of string theory.

As it stands, string theories are unproved, and
perhaps unprovable, as they involve interactions
at energy levels far beyond any we can handle.
But they are beautiful, to those versed enough in
the language of mathematics to follow them.
And in their beauty (and perhaps in their
impenetrability) they are the heirs to Einstein's
primitive, first attempts to produce a unified
field theory.

Between 1905 to 1925, Einstein transformed
humankind's understanding of nature on every
scale, from the smallest to that of the cosmos as
a whole. Now, nearly a century after he began
to make his mark, we are still exploring
Einstein's universe. The problems he could not
solve remain the ones that define the cutting
edge, the most tantalizing and compelling.

You can't touch that. Who's smarter? No one
since Newton comes close.[1]

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Copyright © Marc Bergvelt. 1998-2002. All Rights Reserved.

[ 1 ] Thomas Levenson is a Boston-based independent film maker and author. He is a producer of NOVA's Einstein Revealed, and author of several books.